The Record Company, Rosie, Gave Me a Big Advance

Brian Doherty from the July 1997 issue

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An entire world of rock music--where much of today's best rock comes from--is in fact produced by tiny bedroom capitalists out of surplus income without any expectation of widespread fame or wealth. Strangely, old-school anti-capitalist rock critics like Goodman are usually the last to mention this. You'd think a book about rock vs. commerce would at least show signs of knowing that the world of independent, underground rock exists, but this one doesn't.

Goodman's dichotomy--art vs. money --is falsified by the reality he refuses to confront. That selling the art can bring in tons of money doesn't mean that money is necessarily defeating art. It just means lots of people want to buy the art. Goodman also shows, but refuses to tell, how the very infrastructure of clubs and booking that helped bring rock to the people came about only because money-grubbing sharpies like Barcelona made it happen--and they made it happen because they knew people's desire for rock music could equal money for them.

Goodman pays lip service to the idea that it is "possible to both achieve commercial success and rise above it [but it] requires an absolute faith and focus in the intrinsic value of the work itself rather than smart career moves." But he doesn't bother to explain why commercial success is something one must "rise above," if it comes about from doing grand work.

The extended example Goodman uses to dramatize his point is singularly poorly chosen. He tells the story of Bruce Springsteen in greater detail than that of any other musician. Goodman shows us Springsteen's beginnings as a confused kid under the tutelage of sharpie Mike Appel, who simultaneously managed him, ran the production company through which his contracts were signed, and owned his publishing. He then chronicles the confused adult who escaped Appel through a series of lawsuits prompted by rock critic/social climber Jon Landau. Landau ran Rolling Stone's record review section even as he worked as a producer for major record labels. He was originally slated to produce the first record by his pals the J. Geils Band, but couldn't finish the job. So when the record came out, he just gave it a glowing review in Rolling Stone, without mentioning his connection with the band.

Landau became one of Springsteen's biggest fans in the rock critic fraternity, boosting Springsteen's profile enormously with his famous quote, used by Columbia in ads, that "I have seen rock 'n' roll future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen." In a move that could be considered insider trading, Landau talked up the value of Springsteen and then bought in cheap. After producing Springsteen's breakthrough album, 1975's Born to Run, and guiding Springsteen through the morass of lawsuits to extricate himself from Appel, Landau came out at the other end Springsteen's manager, producer, and best friend and confidant.

He also began changing Springsteen's personality, or at least his image. The scruffy, rock/youth-myth-oriented Springsteen was fed books about Woody Guthrie and imbued with a "social conscience." Landau encouraged him to record an all-acoustic solo album of dark meditations on poor Americans gone wrong, Nebraska, in 1982. While not a smashing commercial success, it provided an even stronger critical push that helped propel Springsteen's breakthrough to the next level of superstardom.

Springsteen's and Landau's next move shows the ambiguity of Goodman's characterization of "smart career moves." The fact is, it's difficult to know what a smart career move will be beforehand.

Springsteen's follow-up to Nebraska, Born in the U.S.A., became a mega-selling monstrosity--something that Goodman bitterly quotes a Columbia executive calling "a great marketing experience"--but it was by no means a sure thing. And while Columbia, of course, did all it could to push the album, there's no reason to believe that Springsteen made the work with anything less than artistically pure motives.

In fact, the Guthrie-style ideology that Landau fed him put Springsteen squarely against the morning-in-America Reagan re-election Zeitgeist. Sure, many listeners--including Reagan's campaign staff--managed to misread the LP's title track, a bitter rant from an ex-vet, as mere patriotic effusion. But there's no way Springsteen, or Columbia, could have known that. In the way the album's opening title track and its conclusion, "My Hometown," cast themselves in opposition to the prevailing political winds, and the way the hit single "I'm on Fire" emulated the stark music of Nebraska, Born in the U.S.A. was in some respects an artistically daring move.

It still made tons of money for Springsteen, and for many charities for poor American workers. Goodman pokes at Springsteen for not putting enough of his money where his mouth is when it comes to charity. He has a point. While I hate to pretend that Springsteen is obligated to share his wealth with thousands of strangers, it does grate to hear someone who is fabulously successful from capitalism excoriate "the system's" flaws, without acknowledging that he has the resources to right--all by himself--the flaws he sees (families without enough money to buy new cars, the jobless) for thousands of people.

Landau for much of this book is por-trayed as an unethical, anti-art, money-grubbing climber. Still, he is the man who imbued Springsteen with the "social conscience" that so many bleeding-heart critics loved about him. The story of Born in the U.S.A. is more complicated, then, than the simple moral about marketing overpowering art that Goodman tries to derive.

Goodman provides a clue to the complicated relation between money and authenticity when he points out that there was an audience in the early '60s Boston folk scene who rejected anything out of New York because they thought it "had some kind of manufactured zeal behind it." An anti-commercial ethos, it seems, can sell. (Goodman tells of a Columbia employee bragging that its corporate money, in record ads, kept the radically anti-capitalist underground press of the late '60s alive.) There are ironies about marketing and commercialism and money that Goodman misses.

Money doesn't just follow grubbing after money. Money follows anything that people want, and people want, or are capable of wanting, that beautiful and mysterious music that Goodman in his youth called a "secret language" as much as cheap garbage. People's desire to pursue that secret language of rock is what built the industry Goodman looks at cross-eyed in this book, and what made American record companies a favorite foreign takeover target in the 1980s. Markets and money make stories that are more complicated than Goodman thinks. Luckily, he is honest enough as a reporter that people looking for those more complicated stories can find them here as well.